


The Descent (Daemonheim Diaries)

by Laetitia_Laetitii



Category: Runescape
Genre: Gen, daemonheim, dungeoneering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 10:35:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6325615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laetitia_Laetitii/pseuds/Laetitia_Laetitii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I started this series in March 2015, wrote three chapters over as many days, and then dropped it. Although it's unfinished, it might still be interesting for people who like Dungeoneering and a bit of the old eldritch terror.</p><p>Shortly after Thok and Marmaros  return from the depths of Daemonheim, an outerlander sets out to explore the dungeons.<br/>I never learned who the narrator is, but he's not my World Guardian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I

I

Last night I heard the whispers again.  
When I say “night”, one should understand that I merely refer to the time I spend asleep, for there is no way of ascertaining time in this place. For the same reason I have no idea of how long I have been here, hence I number rather than date my entries.

I stepped down the first flight of stairs on the 16th of Bennath, two days after the full moon, and have slept ten times since. Yet how long I sleep, or how long I stay awake between rests, I do not know. Sometimes I wake up to the cold ashes of a long-expired fire (extremities stiff, frost in my hair) and nevertheless feel I have scarcely slept, other times I seem to wake up every few minutes and my fire seems to burn for ages without consuming the wood.

There are other things of course, besides the absence of natural light that affect my sleep. Though I never rest without first checking the locks on all surrounding doors (and making sure I have an escape route), I can never be sure what moves behind them, or if the things are aware of my presence. While I have not actually seen a single living being here there are distant footfalls –of both two- and four-legged beings, as well as strange scratching sounds.

Then there are the whispers.

They –alongside with other evidence of occupation –were completely absent from the first floor. What was at the bottom of that first stairway was mostly frozen debris: crumbling pillars and doors torn from their hinges, with the roof completely caved in in the easternmost rooms. The Fremenniks who explored these halls before me had cleared a way through the wreckage, however, and had suspended a sturdy rope ladder in a collapsed stairwell leading to the floor below. Down the ladder I went (ten days ago?) and entered a strange, twisted world, unnatural and unwholesome; a world that I believe should be sealed away once more before the things hiding in it have a chance to escape. Nonetheless, before it is shut away forever I wish to study it, if only to better protect the world above from its horrors.

As I write, a piping sound rises from the pit in the corner. High-pitched and musical, something in its rhythm suggests intent. The first few times I heard it, I put it down to air whistling in the ventilation shaft (I believe that to be the function of these odd, bottomless pits that are found throughout the floors), but lately I have noticed there are certain repeated patterns in its melody, odd pauses and staccatos that hint at –no, my fears colour my assessment again.

Yet there are other sounds in this tomb that hold more terror than the whistling.

It was on the first floor down from the wrecked one where I began to understand the structure of this place. It appears to be built like a subterranean tower, floor on top of floor, with stairs connecting each level to the adjacent ones. One staircase only ever connects two levels, and the next one may be behind any amount of rooms and doors equipped with the most cunning locks. Throughout the structure –this is only the third floor down, so I don’t know if my description will hold –there are ventilation shafts and wells of ice-cold fresh water that seem to reach miles into the earth. This implies that the original builders needed both air and water to survive. Not necessarily human, but sharing at least some of our needs. The chambers are high and the doorways wide, yet the narrow staircases between the floors would force a broad-shouldered man to walk sideways.

Wind-whistle again: fluttering scales in crescendo, a pause, a faint trill. The pattern sounds familiar, but I might have dreamed it.

But it is not the wind in the shafts that chills my blood. 

The first “night” on that first intact floor I camped in a corner room. I barricaded the door to the part I had not explored, and made sure my way back to the rope ladder was clear. The wood from the abandoned furniture was too deeply frozen to burn, but the remains of a storage crate brought from the floor above made a satisfactory fire. After a light meal of dried meat and flatbread I stoked the fire and laid down as close to it as I safely could. (Down here the air is considerably warmer, though still cold. Perhaps there is some kind of a subterranean –possibly volcanic –heat source about.) Far across the floor of the vault-ceilinged chamber, chosen because it only had two doors, opened a pit hardly six feet across, but boundless in depth. It was the first of its kind I had encountered, and it had aroused my curiosity greatly. Crouching at the edge of the abyss, I had held a piece of lit kindling above it. The flame flared and flickered in the current, and the second it burned my fingers I let go. For a heartbeat or two it lit the sides of the pit (sheer rock, the surface unfinished) and then the spark went out or the darkness swallowed it. I was still there, the flame’s green afterimage dancing in my field of vision, when from the depths a shrill whistle rose, a few tentative notes in minor.  
I told myself it was only the current, and I could then still believe it, still ignore it. I could not ignore what I heard later.

The fact remains that all the other sounds could be put down to senseless animals. Nothing in the muffled footsteps that echo from behind sealed doors suggests intelligence, and even that damn whistling could be instinctual despite its recurring patterns. But what came later that night as I lay on my side beside the fire was a thousand times more terrifying.

I was halfway between waking and sleep and hardly aware of the crackling of the wood, when another sound invaded my consciousness. I could not say whence it came, only that it seemed to be emitted by the walls themselves. It –or should I say they, for it sounded like many voices at once –was soft and stifled, almost an echo rather than the sound proper. But its most horrifying quality was not the suggestion of a multitude of makers, but the fact that it was indisputably speech. I could not make out the words, or even recognize the language –characterized by strange throaty growls and hissing sibilants as it was –but the rhythm and structure of it was plain in its meaning.  
Whatever spoke in the dark was both inhuman and sapient. 

It has also been following me ever since.

Mostly I hear it when I'm resting. Sometimes, when I'm working on the puzzle-lock of a door, or sitting down and in the middle of a meal, when I stay still enough, that is to say, I might catch a few words of the whispers, the sound coming from nearby, but never quite from in the room.

Something knows I'm here. Something follows me as I proceed from floor to floor, and comments on me as I cease to move…as it thinks me asleep? I do not know whether I should investigate the phenomenon, or simply ignore it for now. I do not know if it wants me in or out. Both prospects carry equal terror, and terror is something I cannot afford. I must remain calm and clear in thought and purpose.

I have been sitting here for an hour, going by the degree to which the logs have burned. Beside it, the only source of light in this room (square, no partitions, three doors with two of them barricaded) is a faint glow from the strange runes carved upon what I believe to be the northbound door. (My compass became useless on the second floor down. The needle either circles around like the hand of a clock or stays still as if nailed down.) Staring at the pale, greenish light I find myself waiting, and listening for the whisperers in the walls.


	2. II

II

Before embarking on my descent, I spent a few days at the Fremennik camp at the surface ruins. Not many of the people there have ever been to these accursed halls –there might be one or two still left, I hear –and only two have ever explored their full extent. I met them both, a pair of brothers in fact, but sadly neither of them imparted much information. 

The older one, despite my reasonable command of the Northern Tongue, would not speak to an outerlander. Answering my questions in monosyllabics, he made little effort to conceal his contempt of me and his disapproval of my presence at the camp. The younger one proved a different story, and a cautionary tale at that. I could not make much of his account, but something he had seen in these halls had affected his mind in a terrible way. Though he bore no signs of physical injury, he was nearly an invalid. Vacant and unresponsive, he would mostly sit around, rocking back and forth to calm the shaking of his body and mutter inaudible words to himself. At night, I would often hear his cries from the tent he shared with his brother.

He had intermittent periods of lucidity, however, during which he came off as both intelligent and more than willing to discuss his experiences with me. During one such bout he gave me to peruse his journal, in which he had recorded accounts of the inhabitants of the dungeons, as well as maps of some of the floors and instructions on opening certain types of locks. Towards the end the entries became short and confused, and it was impossible to tell whether the things described were real or imaginary. By the time I returned the book (having copied out the maps and those passages I deemed relevant), he had lapsed back to his disconnected state again.

I return now to the notes I copied from him. According to them, the stairway down lies a knight’s move behind the door I call the westbound one. Despite my eagerness to explore the floor below, the runed door in the room I wrote the previous entry in holds my fascination. Though my progress is slow thanks to various kinds of insidious locks and the need de-barricade and occasionally de-frost doors before I can get to work on them, backtracking is relatively fast. My current plan is to clear the way to the stairs down, secure the first chamber of the next level, and then return to the enchanted door. My predecessors, being Fremennik, had left it well alone, with the mapmaker scrawling a large, black X over it. 

As for me, no such cultural taboos bind me. And with my expertise in runic magics, there are few reasons why I could not work my way through the door, given enough time. Something about the faintly glowing letters, square in outline and aquamarine in colour, enchants me as surely as they enchant the door. Something in them, or perhaps something beyond them calls to me in a way that goes beyond scholastic curiosity. 

Watching their glow from behind half-closed eyelids last night (six chambers away from my current location) I recalled, half-dreaming, what a natural scientist friend of mine once said: that in the deep, dark places of this world there live predatory things that emit a natural light of their own in order to attract prey.

Such associations, such fancy.


	3. III

My provisions are running low.

Despite rigid rationing, my food supplies seem to have vanished quicker than I anticipated. Furthermore, unless I find some those subterranean trees I was told of, I only have enough firewood left for four nights. The journey back might take two days, and while hunger is endurable, freezing is lethal.

Apart from the two explorers, the other inhabitants of the surface camp were much more accommodating, especially when they learned I spoke their language. By and large, Fremenniks have little love for foreigners, but in that forlorn place I think any outside contact was welcome. 

Many of those who had been to the demon halls, as they call this place, sought to advise me. They spoke to me of malformed subterranean trees that made good firewood, of fish found in the freshwater springs, and tried to describe the types of edible mushrooms I might come across. One of them, a genial older fellow who had been to the lower floors gave me a garbled account of the monsters he had battled, both humanoid and beast, and tried to instruct me in their slaying.  
I have yet to encounter any of the things I was told of, but their words have stayed in my brain.

Their advice was practical, as befits such sturdy, basic folk. I believe only the younger brother, the disturbed one, might have had the intelligence and sensitivity to seriously discuss matters such as the whispers and the whistles (which I heard again this morning two rooms ago.) None of the others certainly gave no hint of such things. Yet something that wretched young man said stayed with me…something about voices calling, some odd reference to a presence…I recall he burst out in screams mid-sentence and his brute of a brother drove me away.

Before I went on my way (was it two weeks ago? More or less than that?) I bartered for provisions. My travels have taught me to always carry a few trade goods on me, as one never knows what will be needed next. As it is impossible to know exactly what the desired commodities in any place are, I always go for the universals: gold, medicine, sparkling curios and intoxicants. I'd advise a fellow travelling adventurer to have a selection of the following on his person: Gold, preferably in the form of jewellery –the people you trade with may have no concept of money, but most every race has a concept of personal adornment. Medicine –almost any will do- I rely on anti-inflammatory salves (such as can be purchased from any competent herbalist) or blood moss (proved valueless here, more on that later), but anything that you can claim prevents infection, stops haemorrhage or brings down fever should do. Trinkets are always good –I tend to have a selection of magnifying glasses and mirrors, as well as a few ornamental glass beads or such, the more colourful the better. Finally, there are intoxicating substances: alcohol, certain herbs, and to a lesser extent (depending on the race of your trade-partner), tobacco. The last one has proved the best choice, and I never travel without a pouch or two. On a general level, I’d instruct travellers to bring goods that are reasonably priced and small and light to carry.

My inventory did not fail me here. While the Fremennik waved away my trinkets, they showed great curiosity at the gold, the medicine and the pipe-tobacco. The same greying man who told me of the monsters advised me to chuck away the blood moss, pointing out to me a strange reddish plant he said was ten times more efficient in treating wounds. It grew all over the rocks, spongy to the touch, and the man urged me to gather a supply of it. I recently had to apply some of this plant on a nick on my hand, and not only did the blood stop flowing immediately, the pain died down as well.

So, after a lot of haggling and negotiating, I traded a heavy gold necklace, three vials of fever-reducing potion and a full pouch of pipe-tobacco for the following: a mattock of unknown but resilient metal; two coils of rope, jute; an air-dried ham weighing four pounds; two pounds of rye flatbread (the sour, dry kind that keeps forever); a tenth of a pound of salt and two bundles of birch-bark kindling. As a kind of afterthought, I exchanged a ring for some fishing hooks and line. Clearly thinking that short-changing even an outerlander would be a breach of his honour, the man in charge of the wares threw in a ball of snare and a string of dried apples. I have thought of him with fondness many a mealtime because of the last.


End file.
